Research Article ‘‘Forget to Whom You Have Told This Proverb’’: Directed Forgetting of Destination Memory in Alzheimer’s Disease Mohamad El Haj, 1 Marie-Charlotte Gandolphe, 1 Philippe Allain, 2,3,4 Luciano Fasotti, 5 and Pascal Antoine 1 1 SCALab UMR CNRS 9193, University of Lille, 59653 Villeneuve d’Ascq Cedex, France 2 Laboratoire de Psychologie des Pays de la Loire (EA 4638), LUNAM Universit´ e, Universit´ e d’Angers, 49000 Angers, France 3 Centre M´ emoire de Ressources et de Recherches, CHU Angers, 49000 Angers, France 4 Centre National de R´ ef´ erence des Maladies Neurog´ en´ etiques, CHU Angers, 49000 Angers, France 5 Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, 6500 HP Nijmegen, Netherlands Correspondence should be addressed to Mohamad El Haj; el.haj@hotmail.fr Received 22 February 2015; Revised 21 March 2015; Accepted 21 March 2015 Academic Editor: Enzo Emanuele Copyright © 2015 Mohamad El Haj et al. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Destination memory is the ability to remember the receiver of transmitted information. By means of a destination memory directed forgetting task, we investigated whether participants with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) were able to suppress irrelevant information in destination memory. Twenty-six AD participants and 30 healthy elderly subjects were asked to tell 10 diferent proverbs to 10 diferent celebrities (List 1). Aterwards, half of the participants were instructed to forget the destinations (i.e., the celebrities) whereas the other half were asked to keep them in mind. Ater telling 10 other proverbs to 10 other celebrities (List 2), participants were asked to read numbers aloud. Subsequently, all the participants were asked to remember the destinations of List 1 and List 2, regardless of the forget or remember instructions. he results show similar destination memory in AD participants who were asked to forget the destinations of List 1 and those who were asked to retain them. hese indings are attributed to inhibitory deicits, by which AD participants have diiculties to suppress irrelevant information in destination memory. 1. Introduction Episodic memory decline has been proposed as the cognitive hallmark of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) [1–6]. his decline can be related to inhibitory dysfunction. Since inhibitory weakness, as observed in aging, is argued to saturate memory with too much information, this may result in competition between appropriate and inappropriate information at the moment of retrieval [7, 8]. In line with this idea, a compro- mised inhibitory ability was observed in several studies with subjects sufering from AD. In these studies, it was shown that AD participants have diiculties in suppressing irrelevant information in memory. his inding was investigated with the directed forgetting method [9–11]. In its conventional coniguration, the directed forgetting list method requires the processing of two lists of words (i.e., List 1 + List 2) [12–17]. Subjects are typically asked to retain the words of List 1, ater which they are instructed either to continue remembering or to forget the words of this list. Subsequently, participants are asked to retain the words of List 2. Finally, in a recall test, they are asked to recall all of the words of both the lists, regardless of the previous forget or remember instructions. Two main efects of the directed forgetting method are described: a cost and a beneit efect. he directed forgetting cost refers to the observation that participants with the forget instruction usually show poorer memory for the items of List 1 than the remember participants. he directed forgetting beneit refers to the inding that sometimes the subjects with the forget instruction show better memory for the items of List 2 than the remember participants. Although it has also been found that List 1 cost may occur without List 2 beneit, both directed Hindawi Publishing Corporation Behavioural Neurology Volume 2015, Article ID 215971, 7 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/215971